Interactive graphics for Web based applications

The requirements of Web applications are becoming more complex but the software designer has few tools to assist development. The HTML specification has no support for graphical displays such as maps, diagrams, and graphs, so the software designer is forced to use custom specialised software or inadequate parts of the HTML protocol to implement this part of the Web application user interface. The paper introduces the Generic Graphics Applet (GGA) which is intended to be a flexible general purpose interactive graphics display client. The GGA integrates tightly with DHTML and communicates with an application component on the server. Mouse events on GGA objects and messages from DHTML are sent to the server where application logic decides the required action. The server responds by sending graphics commands to the applet which renders them with the specified attributes in the application defined layers. This flexible functionality allows sophisticated Web based applications to be built